A new report released by the Baker administration demonstrates the need for Massachusetts to implement much more ambitious policies to reduce pollution coming from transportation.
Yesterday, the Baker administration released the latest 5-year update to the Massachusetts Clean Energy and Climate Plan. This is an important document that is meant to track the state’s progress to achieve our statewide global warming emissions limits. Massachusetts’ global warming law requires the state to cut our emissions to 25% of 1990 levels by 2020 and 80% reductions by 2050.
The report shows that the state has made major progress in reducing emissions from electricity, significant progress in reducing emissions from heating our buildings, and no progress at all in transportation. In fact, transportation emissions were higher in 2013 than 1990:
With gas under $2 per gallon and SUV sales up, it is safe to assume that transportation sector emissions were higher in 2015 then they were in 2013 – and that emissions will continue to climb in 2016 as well. Eight years after the state passed the Global Warming Solutions Act, we have yet to even stabilize emissions in the transportation sector, much less begun to make the cuts that are necessary to achieve the state’s climate goals.
One reason that the state is making so much more progress in electricity than we are in transportation is because through the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), the state has created a market-based policy to cap emissions in the electric sector. We haven’t done anything comparable in transportation. So if you are an electric utility, you currently have to purchase a permit from the state for every metric ton of pollution you emit, and that money goes to reduce energy costs for consumers. But if you are a transportation fuel distributor, you don’t have to purchase any permits at all – you are allowed to pollute for free.
5 Governors in the Northeast region recently announced that they are going to explore a program modeled after RGGI in the transportation sector. Analysis shows that such a program, when combined with additional policies such as a Clean Fuel Standard, could reduce transportation-sector emissions by up to 40% by 2030, while creating over 90,000 jobs in the region and saving consumers $72 billion.
Charlie Baker wasn’t one of the five Governors, but it’s not too late to join the conversation. The Baker administration states in this report that “[t]he importance of reducing emissions from transportation—now the largest emissions sector—is recognized and a priority for the Administration.”
I hope so. It’s clear from the report that administration officials have a broad understanding of the steps are necessary to achieve transportation sector emissions reductions: promoting new technologies such as plug in vehicles, increasing investments in public transportation, creating policies to encourage smart growth, walking and biking. What is less clear is whether and how the administration intends to find the resources necessary to scale up these solutions to a level where transportation emissions will stop going up and start going down.
Daniel Gatti is Executive Director of Massachusetts League of Environmental Voters (MLEV) and a consultant to the Massachusetts Campaign for a Clean Energy Future, which advocates for smart carbon pricing policies in MA. You can follow me on twitter @danielsgatti or @massenvirovoter. And while you’re at it like us on facebook too.
I can’t get the BMG editor to work with this image.
I can’t upload images, have to post them elsewhere (i.e. Flickr) and then insert the code or URL.
This has always been the case. Images require significantly more storage space than text, and so must be stored elsewhere and made available through an “img” tag.
It’s not too hard to do by hand — from a right-button menu while your cursor is over an image in a web browser, click “Copy image location”. This puts the image URL in your paste buffer.
Insert an image tag in your comment, as follows:
<img src=”image.url.here” width=”123″ />
The “width” attribute is optional, its value is the number of pixels to allocate for the width of the resulting image in your text. I usually use a number in the 400-500 range.
I’ve long floated the idea of moving CO2 from gasoline onto RGGI. I think it’s quite elegant. But, there may be a bit of a problem of money.
When RGGI (for elec) was introduced, it created new revenue. That money went toward really great things in Massachusetts — energy efficiency (65%), municipal programs (20%), low income EE (10%), other RE related stuff (3%), program administration (3%). But it was new money, so the legislature didn’t sweat spending it on these particular priorities.
So what would RGGI for gasoline cost? At $5/sh.ton for a RGGI allowance and 20 lbs CO2/gallon, you’re looking at a nickle per gallon for RGGI motor vehicles. As the allowance price drifts up to $10, you’re at 10 cents per gallon.
If RGGI (for gasoline) is rolled out, it’s either (a) an increase in tax+fee for gasoline, or (b) comes with a corresponding reduction in the gas tax. If (a), the leg has to deal with a much more obvious and perhaps much bigger increase as a percentage of price increase. Americans, including Mass voters, are far more sensitive to the price of gasoline than most things. Will the MA leg really increase the gas tax+fee by a dime? I have my doubts that the appetite is there. If (b), then you’ve got a change in bureaucracy, but no change in revenue or price, so it’s not such a difference.
Which brings me to two questions: if gasoline goes up by a dime a gallon, how much reduction would there really be? My bet: not much. Americans are price sensitive to gasoline, but it’s not the game changer we’re getting on the electric side. The second question: what would the legislature do with another 10 cents a gallon of revenue? If I’m reading this chart correctly, we’re looking at roughly $15M a year. Not chump change, but not enough to implement enough mass transit infrastructure to put a dent in the consumption. Doubling it to $30M a year (10c/gallon) isn’t enough either.
So I think that moving motor vehicle fuel to RGGI makes a ton of sense. It aligns policies, ties price to results so the market moves more efficiently, and so forth. But let’s consider the amount of money we’re talking about — and how much it will impact consumer demand for CO2 emitting activities or our ability to reduce that number through spending on mass transit.
Note: <a href="http://www.mass.gov/eea/grants-and-tech-assistance/guidance-technical-assistance/agencies-and-divisions/doer/rggi-auction-proceeds.html"MA revenue on RGGI electric is ~$75M in 2015, which makes me think my projected revenue for gasoline RGGI in MA is low by as much as a factor of 10. After all, if the CO2 from transportation is twice that of elec (see chart up top), the revenue should be twice… which is $150M. But that means the price per gallon is increased by a factor of 10. Think the legislature has the appetite for a 50 cent/gallon increase? Even if they cut the state tax per gallon to 0 (from $0.24/gallon), that’s still more than doubling the state gas tax+fee. So I’m struggling here.
The structural problem in Massachusetts today is that the wealthy don’t pay enough taxes. It is the wealthy, by paying more in taxes, who should be funding the needed transportation infrastructure.
Yes, we should use market signals to continue to decrease fossil fuel use for automobiles. In my view, that is a worthy goal in and of itself.